Thank you for inviting me to talk here today. I see
many familiar faces and other people that I'd be happy
to get to know. I think this is an important meeting.
This ITAC session, and the whole OECD meeting. This is
because in my experience it is important that we talk
to each other, all of us, the techies, the economists,
and the policy people. We live in a connected world
that is developing very rapidly, and none of us have a
full picture of everything. It benefits us to share
our views and increase our understanding.
I want to start off with a personal perspective on
three areas where mixing people with different
backgrounds has been very useful.
My perspective comes from the technical community, and
IETF in particular. The Internet Engineering Task
Force works on core Internet technology standards. It
is an open community, it has no members or membership
fees, to get started you just need to join a mailing
list. There's a few thousand active people on our
lists, from developers to researchers to operations
people, with some policy and regulator folk mixed in as
well.
One of the things we learned on so many occasions at
the IETF was that you can not fully separate technical
questions from other ones. Take economics for
example. Technology choices affect deployment
incentives, for instance. I find myself wishing for an
economist for my developer teams.
And that is perhaps as expected, but technology
questions are intertwined with more general policy
questions as well. I became the IETF chair three years
ago, and thought I'd mostly deal with boring
organisational or technical issues. Then Snowden
happened, and suddenly we had to figure out how well
the Internet protects its users, what the right thing
was, and if the IETF had any role in making
improvements. We did, of course. But I find that
Internet security is another area where shared
understanding is useful. I keep wishing for an
engineer in every politician's team...
My third example is the discussion of Internet's
administrative mechanisms, namely the IANA stewardship
transition project. When I first thought about IANA,
my views were very focused on just one small part of
it, the protocol parameter registries. But the overall
community had a much broader perspective. I'm happy we
decided to deal with the bigger picture, and very happy
with wide-spread support and interest for this in the
world. The transition would not be possible without it.
But I also wanted to talk about Internet evolution in
general. The only constant seems to be change. We need
to avoid us established engineers or other players
working towards just our own perception of the world,
as the younger generations keep redefining what is
needed. The changes are not just about delivering a
service in a new way, they are more fundamental.
An example: traditional TV business is changing
radically. Partially because the underlying technology
changes to IP-based distribution. But also because the
whole concept is changing from linear TV to different
services. This changes not just how the bits are
transmitted, but who you interact with, who the players
are, and what kinds of business models apply. My kids
don't watch TV channels at all, they follow individuals
on youtube. And who knows what they will do in five
years.
At the IETF, some of the things that I think have a big
impact on Internet include the further evolution of the
web, security and privacy work, real-time communication
from browsers, virtualisation, software- and
data-driven networking, and the Internet of Things.
You may think of the web technology platform as
relatively stable while the applications on top of it
are evolving rapidly. But I'm seeing a lot of change in
the platform as well. Last year, we published HTTP
version 2 which was internally a complete redesign. In
July, on our next meeting in Berlin, we'll be
discussing something called QUIC (Quick UDP Internet
Connection), an ever bigger change impacts the
foundations of Web technology, including the
traditional split of layers to TCP, transport layer
security, and HTTP. We are also working on putting
real-time communications and phone calls to browsers,
enabling any website to use the technology that today
is available from applications such as Skype. And these
changes see very large scale deployments.
Similarly, we're seeing a big change in how people use
security and privacy in the Internet. Through the
choices of various web sites, the amount of encrypted
traffic in the Internet is rapidly rising. Because it
fits their needs.
This is partially related to pervasive surveillance
concerns as well. The IETF has always worked on
Internet security, and even more so in the last three
years. We've changed security algorithms that are no
longer trusted. We've published recommendations on how
applications can use security mechanisms. We've built
technology such as HTTP2 that makes the use of security
less expensive. We're working protocols that allow DNS
queries to be done in a private fashion.
I also wanted to touch on economic and policy
challenges with respect to the evolving Internet.
Take for instance interoperability and the Internet of
Things. The Internet Architecture Board of the IETF
recently held a workshop on application-level
interoperability. While many or most systems today can
be a part of the same underlying network, it is still a
problem to connect the systems together at an
application level. I don't want to buy a Microsoft
house and find out that I can't use Apple lightbulbs
with the light switches.
To take an another example from the Internet of Things
area: It is a natural inclination for us to frame the
policy issues in the context of our past
experiences. But it takes time to apply policy, and by
then the actual issues in the Internet may have
changed. We've talked for a long time about being able
to connect everyone on the planet. I personally believe
we actually get to do that real soon, but does it stop
there? Will we be able to introduce smart farming in
fields of Africa? We do not need to connect only the
people. It is time to look further into the future.
And to finish, more than these specific changes and
challenges, what really matters is the principles. Not
just because they are the right thing to do, but
because they actually work and allow the kind of
parallel, global progress that'we seen in the Internet.
These principles include working in a multistakeholder
and open manner. They also include the concept of
permissionless innovation, voluntary standards, and the
power of code and open source collaboration, rather
than top-down design.
Thank you.